Pharmocogenomics fails to address diseases in developing countries

A new study has revealed that despite of various promises made by international scientific community pharmacogenomic, only a few studies have been done on the rare, orphan and tropical diseases in developing countries.

According to the research done by Catherine Olivier, from University of Montreal's School of Public Health, from 1997 to 2003, there were 401 publications on pharmacogenomics identified in the PubMed database and 67 percent of them were published in a single journal, Pharmacogenetics.

Though the number of studies doubled in 2003 to 2010, the apparent enthusiasm for this type of research seems to have been artificially inflated.

Olivier said that the number of original articles, that is, studies focusing on a new aspect of pharmacogenomics, began to decline after 2002 and nearly 23 percent of published studies in pharmacogenomics dealt with the area of oncology, while 14.7 percent dealt with depression and psychological disorders and 13.6 percent was about cardiovascular disorders.

The findings were published in the journal Global Public Health.